The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America
Language: English
Published by Random House USA Inc, 2021
- Hardcover
- Used

Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books (was SecondSale)
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain--in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism (The New York Times).NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR - No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.--Ta-Nehisi Coates Trump summoned the most treacherous forces in American history and conducted them with the ease of a grand maestro.Like many of us, Adam Serwer didn't know that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election. But over the four years that followed, the Atlantic staff writer became one of our most astute analysts of the Trump presidency and the volatile powers it harnessed. The shock that greeted Trump's victory, and the subsequent cruelty of his presidency, represented a failure to confront elements of the American past long thought vanquished. In this searing collection, Serwer chronicles the Trump administration not as an aberration but as an outgrowth of the inequalities the United States was founded on. Serwer is less interested in the presidential spectacle than in the ideological and structural currents behind Trump's rise--including a media that was often blindsided by the ugly realities of what the administration represented and how it came to be. While deeply engaged with the moment, Serwer's writing is also haunted by ghosts of an unresolved American past, a past that torments the present. In bracing new essays and previously published works, he explores white nationalism, myths about migration, the political power of police unions, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. For all the dynamics he examines, cruelty is the glue, the binding agent of a movement fueled by fear and exclusion. Serwer argues that rather than pretending these four years didn't happen or dismissing them as a brief moment of madness, we must face what made them possible and continues to endure. Unless we confront these toxic legacies, the fragile dream of American multiracial democracy will remain vulnerable to the forces that have nearly destroyed it time and again.…
Seller Inventory # 00107777545
- Title
- The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America
- Author
- Adam Serwer
- Publisher
- Random House USA Inc
- Publication year
- 2021
- Condition
- Good
- Binding
- Hardback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0593230809
- ISBN 13
- 9780593230800
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates
To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented—un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump—a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House.
Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer’s phrase “the cruelty is the point” became among the most-used descriptions of Trump’s era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that’s bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy’s profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it’s not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away.
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World of Books (was SecondSale)
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